Bayreuth, Germania, 1926: Frederika e Josef Seifert si sposano. Un matrimonio che, lungi dall'unire gli opposti, polarizza creature già distanti verso lontananze siderali, destinate nelle loro traiettorie a collidere con il più vasto destino europeo: quello del progressivo affermarsi del Nazionalsocialismo e delle sue vittime prescelte. Nel narrare la loro storia la figlia Lucy si chiede: quali individui, quali famiglie hanno albergato dentro di sé la possibilità di questo esito? È possibile isolare il bene o il male in alcuni gesti, il pugno stretto su un coltello da macellaio, lo schiaffo a un bambino, persino il gesto innocuo e leggendario della figlia di Pipino il Breve, che fece cadere il fazzoletto dalla finestra del castello di Schwanberg fondando così la città di Kitzingen, teatro di questa vorticosa vicenda? Indagine sul male privato e collettivo di vertiginosa qualità espressiva, 'Il fazzoletto della figlia di Pipino' è l'unico romanzo della poetessa tedesca Rosmarie Waldrop.

'La riproduzione dei profili' (1987) è una raccolta di brevi, folgoranti prose poetiche, con cui Rosmarie Waldrop scatta istantanee di una conversazione amorosa. Disseminando e ricontestualizzando citazioni da Wittgenstein, Waldrop rende oggetto d'indagine l'esperienza linguistica quando prova a dare forma alla percezione (perlopiù anomala, e quasi intraducibile) dell'altro, rivelando una scrittura segreta e manifesta. Paesaggi fluviali, strade, gesti, stanze, frasi e desideri si attivano nel ricordo, gli esseri che lo abitano riaccadono. Esplorando il discorso amoroso si esplora la relazione tra due corpi, due soggettività, due caratteri, due grammatiche, si scruta la tensione della parola nel congiungere l'esperienza interiore alla realtà, e il momento in cui questa fusione trova un compimento metaforico, sospeso e reversibile.

Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body.  For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.

Poetry. Translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop. Showghi's prose poems leave the map behind and take us into an uncharted place where apparently simple everyday scenes turn, by a little stretch of language, into the unpredictable und strange. As Farhad Shoghi has said, he starts working from a word that he respects for its uncertainty and aims for the exact spot (in landscape or thought) where the word can come back to itself.

Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as itpasses. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodieson the way to vast projects of war.—Rosmarie Waldrop

Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop’s sixth collection of poetry with NewDirections. The first of its two sections, “Sway-Backed Powerlines,” consistsof five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyagesof discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music ofJohn Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction ofzero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary moneyin economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, andwritten in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop’s mostengaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the heightof her creative powers.

Poetry. Translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop. Pen Award for Poetry in Translation, 2008. LINGOS takes as its playground all the cultural baggage of our turn of the century and examines it with a mix of deconstruction, parody and sheer exuberance. The poems flaunt their intent to avoid linearity, prefabricated meaning and the lyrical I. Instead, they cultivate irony, punning, fragmenting, juxtaposing, distorting, and subject everything to an almost compulsive humor--the author and his own methods included. Ulf Stolterfoht was born in 1963 in Stuttgart and now lives in Berlin with his wife and three children. His 3 books of poems are all called Fachsprachen [lingos, jargons, technical terms] and are all published by Urs Engeler Editor: Fachsprachen I-IX (1998), Fachsprachen X-XVIII (2002), which received the Hans-Erich-Nossack-Forderpreis and the Christine Lavant-Preis respectively, and most recently, in 2004, Fachsprachen XIX-XXVII, for which he received the Anna-Seghers-Prize in 2005 and a stipendium to the German Academy in Rome. "Let us only say, that Stolterfoht's poems have something I would count as new possibilities of poetry: an intellectual serenity that is not just witty and satirical, but works with advanced poetic means and proves to be a la hauteur of the satirized subjects"--Jorg Drews.

Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

An homage and response to many of France's best-known poets, including Charles Baudelaire and Raymond Queneau, this collection moves through the streets of Paris, commenting on its inhabitants, its writers, its monumental past, and all its possible futures. Alternating between honesty and evasion, erudition and lightheartedness, constraint and freedom, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart explores a Paris that's no longer “the one we used to find.”

Incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic.

Edmond Jabes (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of France's most important writers of the 20th century. Born in Cairo, he settled in France after being expelled from Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Rosmarie Waldrop is Jabes's primary English translator. Over the course of her long association and friendship with Jabes, Waldrop developed a very nuanced understanding of his work that in turn influenced her development as both writer and translator. Lavish Absence is a book-length essay with a triple focus: it is a memoir of Jabes as Waldrop knew him, it is both an homage to and an explication of Jabes's work, and it is a meditation on the process of translation. The writing interweaves these topics, evoking Jabes's own interest in the themes of exile and nomadism.

Poetry/Prose. Translated from the German by Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton, and Rosmarie Waldrop. "An Oskar-Pastior-poem is like life. As soon as you think you've got hold of it, it has already moved you ahead by the fraction of a hair"-Klaus Hensel. "For Pastior, language itself is the stuff of life.He explores it through puns, lists, strings, heaps, fields, dictionaries, alphabets, collage, montage, potpourris-all in orgiastic expansion. The result is 'thought-music as a leaping perspective'-a perspective, in which a successful 'nonsensical' text like 'ur-cur trusts sulfur baths: plush' (p. 90) 'is infinitely more precise than this kind of statement'"-from the Introductory Note by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Poetry. Fourth in Burning Deck's Dichten = series of current German writing in English translation, REFT AND LIGHT presents a series of exuberant, playful language experiments by the well-known German poet. In an unusual twist, each poem is rendered in multiple English versions by some of America's most daring poets and translators. As editor Rosmarie Waldrop explains, Ernst Jandl's poems are so engrained in the German language that they are impossible to translate... [These] adaptations range from close imitations to freewheeling versions that continue Jandl's thinking into other semantic areas. Contributors include Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, Norma Cole, Ray DiPalma, Kenward Elmslie, Anselm Hollo, Damon Krukowski, Gale Nelson, Joan Retallack, James Sherry, Cole Swensen, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Craig Watson, Marjorie Welish, and others.

Written in the years following the sudden death of Roubaud's wife, Some Thing Black is a profound and moving transcription of loss, mourning, grief, and the attempts to face honestly and live with the consequences of death, the ever-present "not-there-ness" of the person who was/is loved.

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop's remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As "formally adventurous" (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

The Book of Questions, of which volumes IV, V, VI are together published here, is a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man's relation to the world. In these volumes the word is personified in the woman Yael, silence in her still-born child Elya. Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jabes every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world against all that threatens his existence- death, the infinite, silence, that is, God, his primal opponent. How can one speak what cannot be spoken?